Happy holidays dear readers! We hope that you all enjoyed a fantastic Christmas and have plans to celebrate the New Year in whatever ways make you happy. We had a very nice Christmastime both on our own and with family and friends; and we plan to keep things simple for New Years, if we don’t konk out early (which is a very likely scenario!) In the meantime, we’re already thinking about next year’s garden, and we recently received our (very exciting!) compliment of seed catalogs in the mail. It’s been fun putting together our gardening wish list, even though the reality will probably be a little bit less ambitious. We definitely plan to expand our growing area and will probably add a large raised bed in the yard. We also know that tomatoes will form the core of what we grow, and that we’re going to focus more on small-scale companion gardening.
But on this very rainy Sunday (after weeks of cold and warm and snow — it’s like Mother Nature just can’t make up her mind about this winter!), we’re not here to talk about gardening. Rather, we’re here to issue a huge THANK YOU to The Belmont Rooster for nominating Garden State-ments for a blog award: the Shine On award! We can’t imagine a nicer way to end the year than with a little recognition. We didn’t have any grand plans when we started out this blog, and frankly it’s thrilling to know that a few dozen good folks decided to click that “follow” button in order to see what we’re up to. (Promise, the weekly posts will pick back up in another month or two!) To all our followers, we say thank you as well!
So, being new to blog awards, it turns out that accepting a nomination comes with a few tasks. For the Shine On Award, they are as follows:
1.Visit and thank the blogger who nominated you.
Thanks again to The Belmont Rooster. If you’ve not checked out all the gardening goodness on his blog, you’re truly missing out!
2. Acknowledge that blogger on your blog, and link back.
Okay, we already did that; but what the heck, here’s another link!
3. Share seven random, interesting things about yourself.
Well, we don’t know about “interesting,” but we can probably cover random…
- In addition to two people, there’s also one cat and four goldfish residing in our house (rent free!). We may get another cat at some point, but are working first on getting a dog. Lots of work needs to be done to the house and yard before that happens though.
- Between the two of us, one is a vegetarian and one is not. This has always made for a intruging mix of mealtime challenges and resourcefulness.
- Before we moved into our house, our gardening ventures were relegated to small plants in porch-rail planters. They’ve survived well and we’re still using them even if we don’t have a porch with rails. They’ve proved to be absolutely wonderful for herbs!
- We’ve tried to cut down on clutter over the years and have severely curtailed the purchase of miscellaneous knick-knacks. (Though we still have plenty.)
- If we need to have souvenirs of any places we’ve visited, we stick to t-shirts rather than chotchkies.
- Two staples that will always and forever be in our house are tea and coffee, and we have emergency reserves of both!
- The biggest venture we tackled this year was putting a new roof on our garage. Next year, we’re looking into doing more internal renovations and may get started on some big kitchen wish-list plans.
4. Nominate up to 15 bloggers for the Shine On Award, provide a link to their blogs in your post, and notify them on their blogs.
As new bloggers, we have to admit that we haven’t made many inroads with other bloggers — time mostly keeps us away from the computer, though we hope to change that as we continue to grow here. But a number of blogs have proved vastly entertaining to and supportive of us since we started this whole thing in April. In appreciation, we nominate the following blogs for the Shine On Award!
Rantings of an Amateur Chef
The Iris and the Lily
Diary of an ABC Foodie
Going and Growing
Rarasaur
Spy Garden
My Food and Flowers
Sarah the Gardener
cancerkillingrecipe
Laurakane1
Literature and Libation
Skidelpic Tips and Tricks
Happy blogging one and all, and we’ll see you in 2014!
Garden State-ments 
Thank you sooo much for the nomination! I really appreciate it. I have been nominated for these types of awards and have always graciously declined the nice offer, mostly because I never get around to doing the “instructions” of these types of awards 😉 But a HUGE thank you just the same!! I have been browsing seed catalogues too and actually just placed a big order (35 seed packets) from Baker Creek. http://www.rareseeds.com check them out if you haven’t already, they are an awesome source for unusual varieties. Happy garden planning! Look forward to watching your garden grow in 2014!
No worries! We take it that these “blog awards” are just for fun, so how people respond is entirely up to them (even if they choose not to.) We won’t take any offense! We’re looking forward to seeing how the garden turns out next year — good luck to you as well!
Congratulations! I’m looking forward to upcoming episodes of your gardening adventures.
Thanks! We’ve got a lot planned, so it’ll be interesting to see how much of it comes to fruition.
Thank you so much for the nomination!
You’re very welcome! 🙂
Congrats on your award and thank you so much for thinking of me… and a hundred thousand apologies for taking so long to get over here! Somehow I missed the notification. My cats live rent-free, too… those pets have it good. 😉 😀 Thank you again!!
You’re very welcome! And believe us, no need to apologize for the timing of your response. As you can see here, we’ve been on hiatus for some time now. Going to rectify that soon though. 🙂